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The liner notes feature a short story by Bowie, the Diary of Nathan Adler, which outlines a somewhat dystopian version of the year 1999 in which the government, through its arts commission, had created a new bureau to investigate the phenomenon of Art Crime. In this future, murder and mutilation of bodies had become a new underground art craze. The main character, Nathan Adler, was in the business of deciding what of this was legally acceptable as art and what was, in a word, trash. The album is filled with references to characters and their lives as he investigates the complicated events leading up to the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl. One is meant to assume that Bowie's character, Nathan Adler, works for the British government due to several references to the cities of London and Oxford, but in the liner notes these are revealed to be, at least in some cases, London, Ontario and Oxford, New Jersey, indicating that the entire story may take place in North America#8212;or, indeed, that the distinction between the two places has become blurred and indistinguishable.

In interviews, Bowie remarked that the album was meant to reflect the anxiety of the last five years of the millennium:

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Brave is a concept album, based on a news story Steve Hogarth heard on the radio about a girl who was taken into police custody after being found wandering the Severn Bridge. She did not know who she was, where she came from and refused to even speak. This inspired Hogarth to write a fictional story about this girl and what might have led to her being on Severn Bridge in this state.

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Har läst första inlägget

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The story
The story that The Emptiness revolves around was written by Dennis Lee and Shawn Milke. It is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's last poem "Annabel Lee". The short story is included in the album jacket.

Plot
The central character of the story, a sketch artist known simply as "The Artist" wakes up one day to find his lover, Annabel, dead, lying next to him. Heartbroken and terrified, he buries her in his basement and flees. He wanders aimlessly until he comes to a tavern, where he hears the sounds of merriment and laughter. He decides that if he can't be happy no one can and slaughters everyone in the tavern. After wandering through many places and finding Annabel's killer, "The Thespian", at the end of the story The Artist finally comes face to face with him to fight to the death. He is stabbed in his side with a dagger and finds himself in a room with Annabel holding a dagger in hand. From here on the story's point of view switches from The Artist to Annabel where she explains that The Artist had slowly been sinking into madness all this while, as he became more and more withdrawn and his sketches more and more violent. Though she loved him, in the end she had to take his life in the attempt to defend herself from him.

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I prefer to think of it as a "conceptual" album -- one that has the arc and scope of a concept album but never quite follows through. There are scattered references to Scientology, Winnie the Pooh, and Marxism. But really, they're mocking the whole idea of a concept album.

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and it does tell some kind of a story, even if it's impossible to tell what that story may be. In fact, it's difficult to get into the music itself, even as it dazzles with its twists, turns, appropriations, and recontextualizations. And, make no mistakes, Six is frequently dazzling, since Mansun skillfully melds classic prog and pop styles with contemporary ideas

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